Deploying an XML File with Maven

Something clever we’ve started doing at work is publishing common build files to our local maven repository, so builds can depend on known versions of scripts, rather than just the latest from source control.

Setting this up for the simplest case, involves uploading a single file, for instance an ant script, to the repository. The best way I’ve seen this done uses the build-helper plugin, which — amongst many other things — can be used to deploy any file as the primary build artifact.

To deploy a script using the plugin I added the following to the <plugins> element of my pom.

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
  <artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.7</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <phase>package</phase>
      <id>attach-artifacts</id>
      <goals>
        <goal>attach-artifact</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
  <configuration>
    <artifacts>
      <artifact>
        <file>myBuildScript</file>
        <type>xml</type>
      </artifact>
    </artifacts>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

And run with mvn deploy to publish the artifact.

The build-helper-maven-plugin is documented at the Mojo Project.